Last update - 00:00 27/02/2007
Stop the orange torrent
By Shai Binyamini
During the past two years religious Zionism has been broken apart, and is left devoid of leadership and lacking a unified ideological backbone. On the political plane the religious Zionist public is split; part of it supports the "state-oriented" approach, part of it is disengaging from the state and part of it supports the dividing of the land. Palpable testimony to this is evident in the results of the last Knesset elections: Only nine Knesset seats came to the historic union of all the factions of religious Zionism; the rest of the votes "escaped" in all directions, including to parties that support the dividing of the land.
On the sociological plane we have already learned that the national religious public is made up of various streams and factions, from the Hardalim (acronym for ultra-Orthodox nationalists), who follow an ultra-Orthodox way of life, to individuals and groups that define themselves as traditional and have no external signs of religious observance. There is more that divides than is held in common.
Nevertheless, certain elements in the national religious public presume to depict it as a crystallized group that has a single ideological basis, while pushing elements that think differently (like the religious Knesset members from Kadima, Major General Elazar Stern, Yonatan Bassi and Rabbi Yisrael Weiss) outside the legitimate camp. This group is building and nurturing a new, "orange" narrative, which began at the time of the struggle against the disengagement plan and continues to this day.
This story of the national religious public includes within it many "orange" experiences: the call to refuse to obey an order, which came from the Hardali rabbinical faction under the leadership of Rabbi Avraham Shapira, the head of the Merkaz Harav yeshiva; the "orange" rebellion organizations; a well-oiled propaganda campaign in which, severally or individually, the best of the orange spokespeople took part; underground activism that has included, inter alia, the blocking of roads; the dramatic events at Kfar Maimon; the attempt to block the disengagement plan - the "Ninth of Av" of the Jewish settlers in Yesha (the acronym for the territories of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, which also means "salvation" in Hebrew) and the events of the evacuation of Amona.
As part of the construction of the "orange narrative," current events are enlisted to justify the path: the Lebanon war and its results; the fall, one after the other, of the leaders of the disengagement (former prime minister Ariel Sharon, former chief of staff Dan Halutz, former justice minister Haim Ramon, former Disengagement Administration head Yonatan Bassi, Police Commissioner Moshe Karadi) - and still counting. In this narrative there is a clear division between "us" and "them"; "good" and "bad"; "Jews" and "Israelis." In such a view, the conclusion is seemingly clear: Secular Zionism has finished its role and secular society has been emptied of any ideal, is tainted by all the ills that Western culture has brought and is facing a values abyss. Facing all of this stands the clear solution: Only we, the religious Zionists, the remaining scion of the Jewish people, can continue to build a Jewish state.
The teenagers and young people who are seeking clear truths are the ones who are the most influenced by this. For them, there will no longer be any problem in separating from the Israeli public, in separating the full and equal partnership in the State of Israel out of the primary and essential contents of religious Zionism.
The implications of the controlling primacy of the orange narrative over religious Zionist society are tragic. We have already become a "sector," a separate part of the population, which in the eyes of many, instead of bearing the burden, is itself becoming a burden. A source of hope can be found among the silent religious Zionist public that has still not adopted the new way established by the orange narrative. Within this public, which for the most part does not live in Judea and Samaria, there are many who believe in the original religious Zionism, the Zionism that is connected to the people and is neither above nor below it. Strengthening the pragmatic elements in the religious Zionist public will lead to the shaping of an ideological and practical alternative to the orange torrent and to the building of a sober and realistic religious Zionist society in which there will be real, and not closed, discourse.
Only the joining of all these forces to strengthen the alternative, including all of those figures who are being ejected from the religious Zionist mainstream, can prevent, inter alia, the embarrassed silences that are documented every week in Haaretz in the discussion of the abandonment of Yonatan Bassi. Anyone who chooses to stand on the sidelines, silent or embarrassed, would do well to recall the saying attributed to Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
The author is chairman of the Realistic Religious Zionism movement.